IWhen my aunt falls sick, her prodigal arms sketch strange sermonsin the air: her frictioning joints lisp broken psalms intoour ears, into this poem. And everything about Huntington’s says something,says the body is threatened by chaos, errant pathways of neuronsfiring repeatedly, her fingertips play pizzicati on invisible stings.IIAnd one night, after the rain, my father bends at the door for minuteswith drenched cloths fastened to his flesh.He pants out the words: I’m sorry, despite all the medicine, they spread.He holds up a scan and it becomes a photograph of dark clouds.You could almost hear the scrabbling of exile and of small stars in his body—which are actually tumors burning, getting comfortable with being lostas if banishment were immutable to their existence.IIIHere’s the thing: fission does not begin when a father holds a scanspeckled with the gleam of small explosions. It’s a delicate process—the body expiring, the intricate design of it: cells chugging on their suicide vesicleswithout argument, blood vessels giving up their elasticities,or telomeres untwining in perfect obedience to the secret Latin of rot.Entropy is simple and complex, just as jagged street rocks. We are ductilethings chiselled by the same wild winds that drive the vanes of clocks.Fission does not end when a son hides the ashes of his fatherin churning water or gives his body whole to worms.Death is not an emergency but the body limping againstits own walls as it realizes freedom.